Dobson, H. orcid.org/0000-0003-3124-8546, Heppell, T. and Polanco Leal, P. (2023) Understanding prime ministerial leadership in the United Kingdom and Japan in the 21st century: introduction to a special issue. Asian Journal of Comparative Politics, 8 (1). pp. 5-17. ISSN 2057-8911
Abstract
The introduction to this special issue begins by presenting a recent puzzle – the increasingly strong position of the Japanese prime minister, who has traditionally been regarded as weak, in contrast to the increasingly fragile position of the United Kingdom prime minister, who has traditionally been regarded as strong. To make sense of these developments, the introduction reviews existing academic perspectives related to prime ministerial leadership with a specific focus on the literature on the UK and Japanese prime ministers. It subdivides our understanding of prime ministerial leadership into three distinct but inter-related levels of analysis. First, the institutional setting, which concentrates attention upon prime ministers’ relations with the machinery of government and a range of institutions including the executive, legislature and judiciary, and relates to prime ministerial versus cabinet government debates, and the core executive model. Second, the party context, which focuses on prime ministers as leaders of their political parties and debates surrounding party centralisation, internal party cohesion and leadership selection and ejection. Third, the role of agency within these above two settings and in relation to the broader public, which includes the personal skills and performative styles of individual prime ministers.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
Keywords: | Prime ministerial leadership; the United Kingdom; Japan; institutions; core executive; parties; agency; skills and styles; performance |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > School of East Asian Studies (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number ECONOMIC & SOCIAL RESEARCH COUNCIL ES/S014187/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 18 Oct 2022 15:37 |
Last Modified: | 03 Mar 2023 14:50 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/20578911221135298 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:191763 |